


controlling helios

by gortysproject



Series: CEO Angel [2]
Category: Borderlands
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-07-10 15:11:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6990571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gortysproject/pseuds/gortysproject
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Despite everything, she feels like she’s running on borrowed time. Someone will figure out she’s not up for the job. Someone will figure out she’s Jack’s daughter. Someone will figure out she’s little more than a scared girl trying to trick everyone into believing she can be great. And when they do, Angel knows she won’t live long. After all, a week on Helios isn’t nearly enough to change the attitudes of all Hyperion – especially not within the executives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Part 2 of this strange AU I got going on. I have some vague plans for this story, like the events of TFTBL still taking place, but for now, here's something about Angel trying to get actual control of Hyperion.

Angel knows, when she starts reforming Hyperion, that this will be no easy feat. “There’s so much to do,” she told Lilith after the initial Helios takeover. “There’s so much to change.” _So much,_ it turns out, is an understatement.

Lilith and the Vault Hunter – Maya, she begins to call her instead – leave a couple of days later. Together they managed to vaporise the first assassination attempt Angel faces: a man from HR, Gerald Johnson, and according to his files, something close to a worshipper of Jack. Lilith tells Angel that after this guy’s ashes were thrown into orbit, nobody else will be willing to risk it.

Angel isn’t so sure.

Scanning Helios’ records is an easy process to speed through using her phaseshift. Angel doesn’t know what this strange internal eridium reaction has done to her, but it’s definitely made her better. She’s more powerful than she ever has been. More powerful than Maya. More powerful than _Lilith._ But despite this, she can still only process so much, and there’s so much data on Helios that it’s a struggle to know where to start.

The HR team seemed surprised when she didn’t kill them all for Johnson’s betrayal. She holds onto moments like that when she wonders if carrying Hyperion onto a different path is worth it.

Despite everything, she feels like she’s running on borrowed time. Someone will figure out she’s not up for the job. Someone will figure out she’s Jack’s daughter. Someone will figure out she’s little more than a scared girl trying to trick everyone into believing she can be great. And when they do, Angel knows she won’t live long. After all, a week on Helios isn’t nearly enough to change the attitudes of all Hyperion – especially not within the executives.

Management executives, she decided early on, are her worst enemies on this space station. Speaking to them rattles her to her very core – they’re all like Jack, so collected, so charming, so awful. She looks into smiles with polished teeth and she sees the maniacal grins of murderers. _How many did you kill for this job,_ she wants to ask. _Do you still think about them?_ Two executives left peacefully when Angel gave the offer, one of them transferring straight to Maliwan after it turned out she’d been receiving job offers from them this entire time. Another man asked Angel if it were wise to let her go – after all, she could spill all the company secrets to them. 

“Secrets about what?” she replied to him. “Weaponry manufacturing? We aren’t in that business anymore.”

This is Angel’s next problem. Shares in the company are plummeting since Jack’s death and Pandora is strangely close to a genuine economic recession. Having spent years with no company but her own, Angel had read plenty about the 900 years of history that led to humans settling on Pandora, and she knew more than most about Earth, the place they’d come from. She knew about economic structures and how they had come about. At one meeting, she said, “For Pandora to go into economic recession, doesn’t it first need a real, functioning economy?” However, she was only met with blank stares. One man piped up to reply, “Pandora has an economy. We make guns. People buy them. What more do you need?”

It was easier for her to let that go than argue it out. But Pandora’s emergency state as Hyperion collapses slowly still remains a priority on Angel’s agenda.

So, while she scans Helios’ internal systems for a spring cleaning, she also finds herself drafting up ideas on what Hyperion can become.

Popular on the list among everyone is a building developer – it likely reminds them all of Opportunity. And while Angel knows she can’t keep stacking on top of the foundation Jack left her to inherit as CEO, perhaps playing into his beloved memory would be enough to push this idea off the ground.

Meanwhile, Research and Development have been given control of Hyperion eridium mines. “Find out what it can do,” Angel instructed. “This element has to be worth more than a weapon.” She’s living proof of this.

 

The lights are out on the space station when Angel hears a voice from her ECHOcomm. “Yo, Hyperion, it’s me.”

There’s a small smile tugging at the siren’s lips as she sets her pen aside and enhances the ECHO to see Lilith blinking down at her. “You’re on video, Lilith. And I told you not to call me that.”

The holographic screen, created by Angel’s phaseshifting powers, depicts the redhead scrunching up her nose and leaning in closer to the camera. “And I don’t listen to what you’re saying most of the time. It just kinda becomes, _blah blah blah, Hyperion is full of jerks, blah blah blah, I suck at self-preservation, yada yada –_ ”

“I _what_?”

“Kid, I’m hedgin’ my bets that you’re still sat in that stupidly oversized office, working your ass off.”

Angel huffs a laugh, stifling a yawn a moment later against the back of her hand. “I’m not anymore, you distracted me.”

“It is _way_ past your bedtime.”

The CEO can’t even muster up the energy to tell her not to say that, either. Instead, she moves the conversation forward; it’s one they have regularly. “Did you call for something specific, Lilith?”

“Wow, okay, I get the message. And –” There’s a pause. Angel can’t tell from the low quality of the screen, but Lilith seems… uncomfortable. “Yeah, I did. Do I look like the kinda gal that makes social calls in the middle of the night?”

Angel chuckles tiredly, pressing the back of her hand against her mouth to prevent another yawn. “Okay, yeah, fair enough.”

The line falls silent for a moment as Angel waits for Lilith to start talking business, but instead, when the redhead begins to speak, it’s unrelated. “So, up this late, you must be working on somethin’ big.”

Naturally, it catches the CEO off-guard, and she blinks twice before mustering up a reply. “Oh – right. Yeah. I’ve been looking at the Opportunity development and I think Hyperion could genuinely have a future in construction projects. I mean, I’ve been down on Pandora my entire life, and Hyperion facilities are – no offence to Sanctuary, of course – but they’re the only truly well-built facilities on the planet! If we could turn this round, create more – _opportunities,_ so to speak –”

Lilith huffs a laugh at the attempted joke.

“—Then we _could_ set Pandora on course for being a genuinely civilised and hospitable planet. It would be incredible, Lilith.”

Silence fills the cavernous office once again, but only for a moment.

“You sound like you put a lotta thought into this, kid.” Lilith’s voice is strangely flat; nothing near as excited as Angel assumed she would be. “But, uh, there’s something I need to tell you. The Warrior –”

Angel forgot to mention the Warrior before, and cuts in now with renewed interest. “Oh! The Warrior. I didn’t mention, but it would be a hugely important part of the plan. We could use it to – well, not to _kill_ bandits, I’m not Jack, but at least to exercise _control_ over these people until they realise what we’re offering them! It would—”

“You haven’t told her?” The voice comes from off-screen as Angel is interrupted. Roland’s deep tone is different to the relaxed, soothing timbre she normally hears, and as another face comes into sight, she sees the tension in his pressed lips and furrowed brow. 

“Haven’t told me what?” the CEO replies, uncertain now, smoothing out the crumpled notes on her desk. She doesn’t remember standing up during her talk with Lilith, but her palms are now pressed against the surface of the desk, leaning on her arms as she looks directly at Roland on the screen. 

Lilith sighs. “I was _gonna_.”

“You were _gonna_ sit there and wait it out until you had an excuse to go and say nothing at all, Lilith.” Whatever’s concerned Roland, it’s putting Angel on edge. They don’t normally talk like this around her. The soldier’s head turns his gaze from Lilith to the ECHOcomm, and he seems… regretful. Pitiful. Angel doesn’t like it. “The Warrior is dead.”

“Roland, come on.”

The CEO feels her blood – or whatever eridium concoction is powering her – run cold. “What,” she asks, faintly, but it’s not a question. She heard Roland perfectly clearly. Grateful for the support her palms offer her against the desk, Angel’s eyes stay fixed widely on the screen before her. “How? Jack said – Jack said the Warrior was godlike, that –”

“Jack didn’t know any of that, Angel. He only ever guessed.” Roland’s voice is now slow, patient, but she doesn’t like it. 

A shaky exhale slips through parted lips. “How did this happen? Is there footage? Who _did_ this?”

Sharing a glance, Lilith and Roland look equally uneasy now. “That’s the thing,” Lilith says eventually. “It was shot down by loader bots… sent from Helios.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ignoring Angel’s insistence that she’s fine, she can handle this, Lilith sends up Maya. It’s not that Angel isn’t happy to see the familiar face, she just doesn’t like being treated as a child.
> 
> “I can handle this myself, you know,” she tells her blue-haired friend.
> 
> “Like you’ve been handling it so far?” Maya responds, not unkindly. Angel doesn’t reply to that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok so, this is the second of three parts of this short story in the CEO verse, but i do have a third story in mind set after this.  
> tags have been updated to include mayangel!  
> also sorry this took so long to continue, if anyone's still following. i had 0 inspiration to continue for a little while

Ignoring Angel’s insistence that she’s _fine_ , she can _handle_ this, Lilith sends up Maya. It’s not that Angel isn’t happy to see the familiar face, she just doesn’t like being treated as a child.

“I can handle this myself, you know,” she tells her blue-haired friend.

“Like you’ve been handling it so far?” Maya responds, not unkindly. Angel doesn’t reply to that.

The following days on Helios are quiet, tense. Word travels quickly and the knowledge that someone betrayed Hyperion’s new CEO – and more so that the CEO doesn’t know _who_ – has left all of Helios’ inhabitants afraid.

“They think you’re like Jack, still,” Maya says one day. She’s been following Angel around like a bodyguard more than a friend, and when Angel looks at her, her face seems to be set in a permanent frown; lips twisted downwards, eyebrows furrowing in the middle, Maya looks just as concerned as Angel feels.

“I’m not,” is Angel’s immediate answer. “I’ve never been like him. It would be so much easier if they could just trust me not to – to _kill_ them!”

The two of them are sat alone in Angel’s office. Having discarded the yellow swivel chair with the dopamine injectors, and now perches upon a black leather chair in its place. No wheels. No injectors. She’ll never understand her father.

The only difference to the desk in front of her from the way Jack left it is that there is no photo frame. It had tugged at the young woman’s heartstrings, when she first arrived in her new office, seeing her own then-blue eyes sparkling up at the camera, grinning, just a child with a child’s innocence.

The desk currently holds their dinners, neither plate touched. Angel’s hand is curled tightly around a mug of coffee.

(She never liked coffee. She still doesn’t like it. But it is undeniably a source of energy her exhausted body really needs at the moment. Furthermore, she feels better respected by executive management when she’s holding a coffee.)

(Maya still doesn’t like coffee, and every time she sees Angel holding one, she tells her, “I still can’t believe you like coffee.”)

“They’re Hyperions, they’re gonna act like whiny pissbabies around anyone with an ounce of power,” Maya replies, an easy grin on her ice-blue lips. 

Angel half-smiles. “What power _is_ that, exactly? Hacking computer systems? Extracting data? I’m pretty sure for half these guys, what I call _phaseshifting_ is their day job.”

“So what?” asks Maya. “Phaselock is basically a fancy version of what any semi-decent ice gun on the surface of the moon can do. Being a siren is more than that, and you know it.”

With a sigh, Angel pushes her chair back and stands up. Her eyes stray towards the imposing view of Elpis through the window as she replies. “Yeah, but what good is a connection to the Vaults and Eridian technology, if we can’t open any Vaults, and the only known connection to the Eridians just got shot down by _my_ Loaders?”

Elpis seems to glare at her, accusatory, so she looks away again and back at her friend. Maya doesn’t seem to have a good answer ready, so the cavernous room descends into silence for a brief moment. 

“Well,” says Maya eventually, “no Vaults now doesn’t mean no Vaults forever. I’ll find you a Vault. Then you can phaseshift all the data you could ever want from it.”

“That’s not how it works,” Angel begins to protest, but there’s a smile tugging at her lips that ruins her attempt at a lecture. Maya grins back, her eyes flashing mischievously.

Glancing to the desk, fingertips catching the edge of her shirt to fidget uncomfortably, Angel’s next words are, “So you still want to do that? Vault Hunting?” She doesn’t mean to sound so hesitant. Maya shrugs.

“Yeah, I guess.” She leans back on her chair, tilting precariously. “It’s why I came to Pandora, right? Leave the Abbey. Find an adventure. Nobody ever tells you that adventures are boring as crap once they’re over. I mean, I came here to find a Vault and get rich, maybe learn a thing or two about sirens,” and she looks at Angel now, “but instead, all I got was some pansy rebellion against an asshole dictator that nearly killed me a million times over.”

“Oh, sorry,” teases Angel, “was that not adventurous enough for you?”

“Hell, no.” Both sirens laugh. “But, seriously, the Vault Hunting business? Getting a crap ton of money and actually – actually doing some good at the same time? It’s what I was made for. I came to Pandora to ‘find myself’,” and she lifts her hands to place quotation marks around the words, “and as cheesy as it sounds, I think this is it.”

Angel swallows. “You found yourself.”

“Yeah.”

“And right now, this is – what, the intermission between adventures? Take some time to babysit before you go travelling across the universe again?” She didn’t mean to sound bitter, but Maya looks taken aback at the accidental twinge of hurt in her voice.

“You think I don’t wanna be here, huh.”

“I think we both saw the map when Lilith tried to destroy the Warrior’s Key, and between finding Vaults and hanging around on Helios, there’s one thing you clearly want to do more.”

“You know, Lilith didn’t _make_ me come here,” the older woman snaps, any trace of warmth from the previous conversation dissipating. “I – we’re not against you, okay, kid? And you’re not some intermission, some chill time, ’cause I’m on Helios to _help_ you. To find whoever killed the Warrior. So quit acting like you’re a goddamn burden.”

A pervasive quiet creeps between them, filling the room with unease. At that moment the automated lights flicker off, the workers of Helios preparing for sleep with the artificial impersonation of a natural clock moving them from day to night. Angel didn’t realise it had gotten so late, but she now stands behind her desk, the room illuminated only by the bright lights of Elpis. A warm, auburn glow is cast across Maya’s features.

“Sorry,” Angel murmurs, and the other siren lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug. She doesn’t speak for a long moment.

“I know you’re not like him.”

“Excuse me?”

“Jack,” Maya clarifies. “You told me a few minutes ago, you’re not like him. And I’m saying now, _I know_.”

Angel’s eloquent reply is, “Oh.”

 

“I still can’t believe you like that stuff,” is Maya’s opening line the next morning as she steps into the office. Angel is already sat at her desk, scanning through holographic files, abstract pieces of paper taped to the large window behind her. As always, she clutches onto a mug of coffee.

Huffing a tired laugh, the younger woman pushes her dark hair out of her eyes and look up at Maya as she walks across the grand room. “So, there’s still a lapse in security footage,” she tells the approaching siren. “I couldn’t recover the data. But I’ve managed to pull together a list of – uh – suspects? Judging by who was in the area, who has no alibi and who would have the means and the motive to pull this off.”

“Did you get any sleep at _all_ last night?” asks Maya, but Angel carries on.

“I’ve narrowed it down to twelve people. Nine of them are execs. Three in admin. All obsessed with Jack – like, more than usual – and all of them men. They all have either a power base in Hyperion big enough to pass the orders, or technology to hand for them to disable security and send down the Loaders themselves. None of them, according to the footage we _do_ have, were in their homes or at their offices when the Loaders were sent down.”

“Gonna take that as a _no_ on the sleep, then,” mutters Maya.

Angel shrugs sheepishly. “I was on the verge of finding out who killed my Warrior,” she says simply. “I wasn’t about to sleep on it. Would you?”

“Okay, okay, _fine_. So what now?”

This brings a hint of resignation to the young CEO’s eyes. “We have to wait,” she says unhappily. “I can’t get rid of all of them – I’m not Jack. Still. But between these suspects, everything from Security to R&D to Data Mining is a potential threat. Collectively, these men have a lot of power inside Hyperion.” She glances up, her gaze fixed on Maya. “Right now… you’re the only person on Helios I can trust.”

“What’s new,” Maya responds drily.

“But the Warrior was guarding Sanctuary now it’s back on the ground,” Angel continues, choosing not to reply to Maya’s all-too-true comment. “You know that. So whoever killed the Warrior either did it to make me weak, by taking out my biggest weapon, or to make Sanctuary an easier target. Which means –”

“– You’re still in danger.”

“No – well, yeah, but more importantly, the attack isn’t over!” Angel stands up from her leather chair, excited to finally tell Maya the news that matters. “All I have to do is set up surveillance in the moonshot control room that can’t be hacked through the main systems, make myself an – an open target, and wait for whoever killed the Warrior to reveal himself with the second part of his attack!”

Maya’s face distorts into something clearly disapproving. “Make yourself an open target?”

“I have to – he won’t attack me if I’m too protected.”

“So then I stay with you –”

“So then you stay down by the moonshot controls,” Angel interrupts. “Maya, he can’t hack you. And whoever he is, he doesn’t stand a _chance_ against you.” The CEO tries for a smile, but Maya glares in response. 

“Right, ’cause you can protect yourself?”

“Yes!”

“No, Angel, you can’t!”

 _It’s too early for this,_ Angel decides, and she takes a drink of the dark coffee still in her hand, trying not to wince at the taste. “Please, Maya. I need you to trust me on this.”

Maya’s jaw is tight, but after a long, deliberating moment, her stance relaxes fractionally. “What’s your plan, then. Anyone goes down to the control room, I beat ’em up, anyone comes to get you, _you_ beat ’em up?”

“Y…es?” Not one for fooling herself, Angel knows she can’t beat anyone up. It doesn’t mean she’s powerless to prevent an attack, however.

“That’s a crap plan.”

Angel nods. “But it’s all we have.” She lifts the coffee mug to her lips again, violet eyes curiously trained on Maya over the rim of the cup.

Maya doesn’t speak for a long moment, but when she does, her sharp grin has returned. “We’ll kick this guy’s ass,” she tells Angel, confident. It’s a relief to the young CEO; she’d been genuinely worried Maya would refuse her plan.

As the older woman turns to leave, Angel adds quietly, “We’re not killing him, by the way.”

“What?” Maya almost sounds disappointed. 

“We need to keep him alive. You know. To prove a point.”

Their eyes meet, and Maya almost looks like she wants to protest Angel’s decision, but the defiance gradually melts away against the fierce gaze Angel returns. “You’re not very Hyperion, Hyperion.”

With that, Maya turns and begins to walk away. Angel exhales softly to her retreating figure, “ _Good_.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “How’s it goin’, Hyperion?”
> 
> Angel hums nonchalantly, pulling up a video feed on her friend. “You’re on video, Lilith. And Maya’s started calling me that, too.”
> 
> “What, Hyperion?” Lilith snickers. “How is she, anyway? Haven’t heard anythin’ from her since she went up there. I swear, I ask for one thing. _Call me when you reach Helios, Maya. Let me know if Sanctuary’s about to become Moonshot Central, Maya._ Bitch didn’t pay attention to me at all.” There’s no venom in her tone. “Haven’t even heard anythin’ from _you_ since Maya left. Roland was gettin’ worried.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> look i found this in my drafts from like 5 months ago i have NO idea why i didn't upload it before but for continuity's sake have the end of this au that was NOT supposed to take the better part of a year to finish. <3

For the rest of the day, Angel is alone. Maya has set up a space within the control room to keep watch over the moonshot controls – “A stakeout, seriously?” she’d asked, but her incredulous tone didn’t quite cover up the underlying disappointment that she couldn’t simply rig the entire room with traps – and the CEO cancels all meetings that day. Having transferred data files to paper, she now transfers them back, pulling down the files she’d taped to the window and leaving them in stacks on her desk to sort through. Naturally, during this is the time Lilith chooses to call.

“How’s it goin’, Hyperion?”

Angel hums nonchalantly, pulling up a video feed on her friend. “You’re on video, Lilith. And Maya’s started calling me that, too.”

“What, Hyperion?” Lilith snickers. “How is she, anyway? Haven’t heard anythin’ from her since she went up there. I swear, I ask for one thing. _Call me when you reach Helios, Maya. Let me know if Sanctuary’s about to become Moonshot Central, Maya._ Bitch didn’t pay attention to me at all.” There’s no venom in her tone. “Haven’t even heard anythin’ from _you_ since Maya left. Roland was gettin’ worried.”

“ _You_ were getting worried,” corrects Roland, off-screen. Lilith offers him her middle finger in return.

“We’re fine,” assures Angel, biting back a smile. “But I don’t think Maya likes it up here.”

Lilith doesn’t look put off by this. “No surprise. She’s roomies with the corporation she was just tryin’ to bring down.” The redhead squints into the camera, and Angel finds herself openly grinning at the endearing sight. 

Then she lets a sigh slide through her teeth, leaning back in her chair as the smile fades. “I mean,” she clarifies, “I don’t think she likes… you know. My way of doing things. And _neither_ of you seem to think I can take care of myself.”

Static crackles through the ECHOcomm’s receiver as Lilith huffs, unimpressed. “One, Maya’s a Vault Hunter. She’s not gonna like being told what to do. But she’s also a big girl who can deal with it. Two, you’re just a kid, Hyperion, and you’re a kid at the head of the most bloodthirsty corporation in the galaxy. And we’d know,” she adds, her eyes flicking to where Angel imagines Roland is still standing. “We’ve been up, close and personal with Atlas.”

“Maya hasn’t,” Angel points out, distantly aware that the comment makes her sound more childish than she’d like to admit. She still glares at her ECHOcomm, irritated.

Lilith shrugs at that. “Let her worry. It’ll do her some good, you know, feeling human emotions and stuff.” Angel frowns at that, so the other siren mutters, “Listen up, will you? Maya volunteered to head up there and look out for you while you try to catch your Warrior-killer. If she wasn’t _her_ , I’d say she actually cares about you.”

Lilith hangs up shortly after, having made Angel insist yet again that she’s okay, leaving the young woman alone once again.

The rest of the day passes in similar, fragmented quiet, the CEO holed up in her large office and the Vault Hunter camped out in the depths of Helios. Angel feels lonely; Maya has only been up there a few days, but already her absence is noticeable. Only in late afternoon, when the papers have all-but disappeared, the day has passed in a blur and Angel spends her free time scrolling absently through security cameras (with a paranoia she’s unwilling to confront), is there a knock on her door.

Glancing to the camera footage outside her office, she sees the executive manage of the Data Mining department outside. Surprisingly, he seems unarmed. She unlocks the door for him.

“Mr Madison,” she greets, the open camera footage projected onto holographic screens flickering and dying abruptly. Neither of them notice the fight in the control room being recorded on camera. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m – I’m super busy today.”

The manager keeps walking forward despite Angel’s comment. She frowns, twisting the cuff of her sleeve nervously. “You could always make an appointment tomo–”

“You’re not the only busy one,” interrupts Madison. “See, Angel,” and on any other occasion she’d consider it a victory that he called her by her first name as she’d wanted them all to from her first day in charge, “I have a lot coming up for me in my schedule soon. I have moonshots to release, old Dahl mining ships to bomb –”

Angel’s eyes widen. Sanctuary.

“– _And_ a company to save from economic recession. But to do that, I have a CEO to kill.”

Remaining unmoving, her indigo eyes fixated on the man walking ever-closer across the large room, Angel hesitates a moment before smiling slightly. “In her own office?” she asks lightly. “Do you really think I’m unguarded here?”

“I think your guard dog is downstairs, and, uh… _preoccupied_. And I think you don’t have as many defences as you’d like.” Madison’s lips twist up, a familiar charming smirk resting on them akin to the ones she sees on all her executive managers. His slick hair and polished teeth, too, are no different to the styles of all the others she’s surrounded by every day.

Calmly, the young woman replies, “Executing phaseshift,” lifting her tattooed arm as it glowers and gripping it into a fist.

And nothing happens.

“Sorry,” says Madison, “were you waiting for your turrets to lower?” The flush in her cheeks, angry, caught out, tells him everything he needs to know. “We destroyed them last night. And every other hidden little weapon Jack had built into this place. They’re all gone, siren.”

Glancing up to the spaces in the high ceiling where her turrets would have lowered from, Angel replies expressionlessly, “But I was here last night.”

Madison grins. “I know.”

He then pulls a Hyperion pistol from his pants’ waistband, and as he leisurely lifts it to aim at her forehead, she thinks she probably should have listened to Maya. “One thing they always say about Hyperion guns,” Madison says, casual, an edge of finality in his tone, “is that they never miss a target. Wonder if that counts if their target is their own maker.” A muscle jumps in his jaw. “Of course it fucking does, heh. We should never have stopped making them.”

Closing her eyes, Angel’s fingertips grip the edge of the arms on her chair. _This is it_ , she thinks dully. _I didn’t even last six months_. All her plans for Hyperion, all her preaching of turning it into a good company… and now she’s sat at the barrel-end of a gun, facing the next Handsome Jack to climb the ranks by murdering his predecessor. There is no way to escape this; there is no gun in her desk, no last ditch plan to save herself. She doesn’t even have access to the trigger for the trapdoor Madison stands on, now that Jack’s yellow chair is gone. Stupid. _Stupid_. Despite any desire to maintain her dignity, she feels tears prick at the corners of her eyes.

Angel waits on baited breath for the sound of a gunshot.

And when it echoes round the room, predicted, expected, she winces. It only reaches her mind that she isn’t dead when the sound of a body hitting the floor follows the gunshot soon after.

Hesitating, and then opening her screwed-shut eyes, Angel sees Madison on the ground in front of her. A single, clean bullet hole opens the back of his head. His downturned face rests in a slowly forming pool of his own blood.

Angel’s shimmering eyes then rise to see Maya, chest rising and falling heavily, body frozen in position; legs apart, arm raised in front of her, gun steady in her clenched fingers, she is perfectly poised to fire. There’s anger in her glare, ferocity in the jut of her jaw, and something akin to fear in the click of her throat when she swallows.

“Told you you couldn’t protect yourself, Hyperion,” is all she says to break the silence, still breathing heavily as she lowers her gun to her side. Angel tries to reply. Maya only hears a strangled sob.

“Hey — hey, you’re okay. He’s dead.” As Maya approaches, holstering her gun and moving around the desk, Angel’s head falls into her hands. She presses the heels of her palms into her eyes, stars bursting across her vision, skin dampening as the tears spill out. 

She hears Maya crouch in front of her, yet flinches when the siren’s hand wraps around her wrist to tug her hands away from her face. “Angel. Look at me.”

“I… I can’t do this.” Angel’s eyes glance up to see Maya; fear is etched into her gaze. “I can’t do this. I can’t. I’m — _useless_. I was gonna _die_.”

Maya shifts awkwardly. “Yeah, and then you didn’t. Power of teamwork, right?” She pauses. “You _can_ do this, you know.” Angel wipes her eyes, roughly, with the back of her free hand. Maya continues. “You’re… you know, pretty awesome. And you totally distracted that asshole long enough for me to kill him. That counts for something, right?”

“I didn’t even know you were there.”

“Yeah, I can tell.” She sighs. “Did you think running Hyperion was gonna be easy?”

“I thought it would be eas _ier_.” She sits up, and Maya lets go of her hand. “I thought people would want the change. I thought people hated Jack — you know, underneath the whole… _loving_ him. I thought if I made this place safer, and happier, and if I made it do good things, then it would… then they would…”

Sitting back on her heels, still crouched down, Maya interrupts. “How many people work for this company?”

Angel hesitates. “I don’t have… exact numbers, but it — there are a couple of million people, approximately.”

“Aaaaaand how many of them tried to kill you?”

Another hesitation. “Two.”

Maya winces. “Actually, um, three. Your buddy there wasn’t working alone, and some guy totally jumped me in the control room. But still, that’s three people that didn’t like the regime change out of _two million_. I think the votes speak for themselves.”

Angel smiles. It’s a weak, watery smile, and she has to wipe her eyes again, but it’s a smile nonetheless. “I guess.”

Maya straightens up. Angel takes a deep breath, and takes the hand offered to her; legs still shaking, heart still racing, she thinks she might need it to stay upright. 

“Come on, Hyperion.”

Angel huffs. “We both know I don’t deserve that nickname.”

Shrugging, Maya pulls her around the desk, still holding her hand. “Yeah, okay. But you’re gonna make that nickname deserve you.” She leans against the edge of the desk. “Now, you wanna call a janitor about the body, or should we shove him out an airlock ourselves? I’ve heard it’s super therapeutic.”

When her words make Angel chuckle, she knows she won’t be leaving Helios to hunt Vaults around the galaxy just yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me @hyperionangel on tumblr if u wanna talk <3


End file.
